Not too long ago, when the idea of solar and wind energy was still hotly debated, critics used to point out the limitations of these energy sources: the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But nowadays many countries’ electricity grids are strongly supplied by renewable energy.The challenge in creating flexible, reliable and affordable energy supply systems with renewables lies in the very different circumstances across countries and regions. Planning and expanding renewable power must consider countries’ local resources and their existing and planned infrastructure. This becomes even more interesting for countries trying to grow their grids and expand their renewables at the...

Ian Tuttle/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize More than 140 scientists who receive funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Saturday urging him to better enforce the social media platform’s policies against incendiary language, The Washington Post reported. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is the philanthropic organization founded by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan in 2015, which focuses on using technology to solve social challenges, including criminal justice reform. It is a separate entity from Facebook. The scientists said in the letter that allowing President Trump to use Facebook “to spread both misinformation and incendiary...

Nintendo is doing everything in its power to stop the public from playing pirated games on the Switch console. Their major adversary is the infamous hacking group Team-Xecuter, which released several ‘jailbreak’ hacks for the games console.
The group is about to launch its latest products, SX-Core and SX-Lite, which will be the first to work on recent Switch consoles including the Lite variant. Nintendo sees this as a major threat and with a series of lawsuits, hopes to limit the availability of these mod devices.
As Nintendo’s efforts to go directly after Team-Xecuter failed, the games company went after nine stores that offered these new hacks for pre-sale instead. This includes Uberchips.com, which is...

Apple will allow customers to buy products including iPads, Macs, and AirPods, via monthly installment payments on the Apple Card, Bloomberg reported. Payments will be managed through the Apple Card section in the iPhone Wallet app and added to customers’ monthly Apple Card bills, according to Bloomberg. For iPads, Macs, the Apple Pencil, iPad keyboards, and the Mac XDR Display monitor, a 12-month, interest-free payment plan will be available, and for AirPods, HomePod, and Apple TV, the plans will be six months interest free.
Last year, Apple rolled out a 24-month, interest-free payment plan for iPhones purchased with an Apple Card, and gives 3 percent cash back. Apple launched the Apple Card last August in...

Despite being the originator of the most popular vampire story of the past 100 or so years, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is incredibly restrained with its vampire nastiness. Dracula, in the novel, is a specter, a mystery, an intriguing incitement to delve deeper into dark horrors that unfold slowly. Read more...

Screenshot by Tom Warren / The Verge Destiny 2’s first ever Fortnite-style live event just wrapped earlier today, and it was unfortunately not quite what some players were expecting. Instead of something monumental and game-changing for a key part of the game world, it was more of a slow burn alternative to a standard video game cutscene. And instead of delivering a strong narrative pay off on a season’s worth of otherwise dull and repetitive activity, the Almighty event ended without any meaningful change in direction or surprising new development. For the last three months, developer Bungie has been building up a clash between the Destiny world’s artificial intelligence supercomputer Rasputin and a...

The beloved online game Neopets is launching an open beta for a new mobile site, the company announced on Twitter Friday. “The Neopets Mobile Beta has arrived! Now you can explore the breathtaking land of Neopia from the palm of your hand!” the very excited company tweeted. In a video posted to Twitter, Neopets brand manager Stephanie Lord thanked fans for their support over the past 20 years, and encouraged fans to test the site. “While this is an open beta, we’re in the very early stages of development and looking forward to all your feedback to help guide the product moving forward.” Ready to see what we’ve got started for the new Neopets mobile-friendly site? We don’t have all of Neopia moved...

The indie game store Itch.io has put together a massive bundle containing 742 indie games worth over $3,400 and is selling the whole thing for $5 to help raise money to support the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund.Read more...

Yesterday we reported that Lattice Semiconductor had inserted a clause that restricted the reverse engineering of bitstreams produced by their FPGA toolchains. Although not explicitly stated, it’s assumed that this was directed toward several projects over the past five years that have created fully open source toolchains by reverse engineering the bitstream protocols of the Lattice ICE40 and ECP5 FPGA architectures. Late yesterday Lattice made an announcement reversing course.
To the open source community, thank-you for pointing out a new bitstream usage restriction in the Lattice Propel license. We are excited about the community’s engagement with Lattice devices and our intent is to not hinder the...

Photo: Michele Doying / The Verge Facebook published new recommendations for group admins yesterday evening in an attempt to help them facilitate conversations about race and inequality. Groups, which are essential to Facebook’s business strategy, have struggled to moderate discussions about the Black Lives Matter movement and injustice in the US, with many admins and moderators deleting posts they consider “political.” The deletion decisions prompted members to leave groups they’d been in for years, argue with each other, form splinter groups, and sometimes temporarily shut the groups down entirely.
Facebook directly addresses the political post ban that many groups follow and recommends that leaders...

You want a good project that combines multiple disciplines, gives you something useful in the end, and will certainly wow the muggles? Or do you simply need a custom rig with which to “jack in” to “cyberspace”? How about building your own luggable, portable, computer with some style — your own cyberdeck?
Coming to you from the fertile world that William Gibson created in “Neuromancer”, “Count Zero”, and “Mona Lisa Overdrive”, cyberdecks were the portable computers that the heroes and anti-heroes roaming the Sprawl would use to connect to what was essentially the Internet. Since we’re already living in the era where large portions of the world are controlled by vast corporations, we...

Eight years ago, Japan passed legislation that made it illegal to download unlicensed movies and music from the Internet. The move to criminalize this activity with a prison sentence of up to two years received a general welcome from copyright holders. However, rightsholders offering other types of content felt left out. Ever since they’ve called for the law to be expanded to include manga (local comics) and other literary works.
Fines and Prison Sentences For Downloaders
This week and after years of work, their goals were achieved. Japan’s parliament passed new copyright amendments Friday that ban the unlicensed downloading of manga, magazines and academic texts from the Internet, in line with the...

A lot of business leaders talk a big game about their commitment to diversity, while making very little progress in actually adding people of color to their boards and C-suites.If they’re truly stymied about how to make the ranks of power less white, perhaps they should consider resigning.That’s the path being taken by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who announced Friday that he is stepping down from the Reddit board and requesting that he be replaced by a black person. “I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now,” he wrote on his personal website. “To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: do not stop.”Read the rest of this story on qz.com....

On a typical microcontroller project we may only have access to a relatively tiny screen. Information display can be a challenge, but it’s one that may be made easier by [0xPIT]’s ESParklines library for Espressif processors using the Arduino framework.
A sparkline is a simple line graph without annotations (like axes or units) intended to fit within the flow of text. They’re largely associated today with the statistician Edward Tufte, and if you’ve not encountered them or Tufte before then we suggest you’ll enjoy educating yourself.
It’s a simple enough library and it comes with example code. Usefully it maintains a data buffer all of its own allowing simple updating, and as well as the examples...

The cost of police brutality is enormous.First and foremost, of course, it is paid in lives: According to the Washington Post database, US police have shot and killed 1,042 men and women in the past 12 months, of whom black people make up a disproportionate number. That doesn’t account for those not killed by firearms, such as George Floyd. There is no official record of police brutality in the US.But police brutality also has a cost in dollars, often borne by taxpayers, and it’s not a small bill.Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

As coronavirus stay-at-home orders and self-mandated quarantines extend beyond the first quarter of 2020, some new consumer behaviors are beginning to emerge among those still thriving (and spending) despite the pandemic’s economic ravages. We first noticed it when otherwise fashionable, non-domestic acquaintances began sharing photos of sourdough starters and herb gardens, touting their new Crocs, and tie-dyeing their clothes with turmeric.This, we realized, was a new species of consumer: the Hipsteader. These hip homesteaders use the energy—and money—they might otherwise have put into social outings in stylish outfits at Instagrammable locations into transforming their home-lives into what writer...

Behold a twist in the tale of remote work that no one saw coming: Now that coronavirus lockdowns are ending region-by-region around the world, some people may need to convince their bosses to let them stop working from home.Office employees have spent years fine-tuning the argument in favor of work-from-anywhere policies, and publications including this one have shared countless posts with advice for winning over a skeptical boss. Now the coronavirus pandemic may turn the whole debate upside down.That’s assuming more companies follow the example of Cloudflare, the cyberprotection and web infrastructure company, which plans to comply with social-distancing guidelines by reopening with just a fraction of its...

Like many people with multiple woodworking tools, [Will Stone] wanted to create a centralized dust collection system. But he quickly found that the devil was in the details, as he struggled to find an economic way to automatically kick on the vacuum when one of the tools started up. His final solution might be one of the most elegant, and surely the cheapest, we’ve ever come across.
As with other DIY systems we’ve seen over the years, [Will] is using a simple inductive current sensor to detect when AC power is being drawn by one of his tools. But where the similarity stops is that there’s nothing so pedestrian as a microcontroller reading the output of the sensor. He realized that when the coils in the...

When the world is on your shoulders, it can be relaxing to remember that we’re just hairless monkeys hurtling through space on a big rock alongside a lot of other rocks. If you find yourself wondering where exactly the other major rocks are instead of worrying, we think that’s a good sign.
Wherever [snowbiscuit] lives, there’s a large planet finder in a public square somewhere that stopped locating rocks a long time ago. Hungry to watch such a thing in action, [snowbiscuit] built a great-looking tabletop version that uses the Horizontal Coordinate System to locate planets. Inside is a Raspberry Pi 3, which queries NASA for azimuth and altitude data and combines that data with a predetermined north...

Authenticity is a unique-yet-subtle truth surfacing from deep within. The path to “being authentic” away from empty platitudes is hard. Authenticity doesn’t conform, it doesn’t play by the rules, and will often cause resistance when it conflicts the self-image you’ve carefully constructed over a lifetime. Each of us has an ego-identity, a way of seeing ourselves and making sense of who we are and our place in the world. Self-actualization is the process of uncovering the truth of who we are and integrating these truths into our personality, to become whole, to live our fullest potential. As well as inner-resistance, it’s common to face resistance from people we know and love. In my experience, this...

There’s a frightening amount of hate in the world right now, and very often, the physical results can be left behind as a constant reminder. Everywhere we go, we're always at risk of seeing slurs tagged on walls, and hateful graffitis hiding under bridges or on buildings. This is where Corey Fleischer comes in. His mission? Erasing hate, one graffiti at a time. And now, his personal motto has turned into a worldwide initiative. Corey saw his first hate sign--and decided to take action Corey started his initiative, Erasing Hate, 9 years ago. At the time, he was driving to a client's house in the suburbs when he spotted a swatiska painted on a block of concrete. As he kept driving and arrived at his client's...

Beyoncé and Solange Knowles are one of the most dynamic, famous, and revered sister duos that have ever walked on the face of this earth. It may sound like we’re being a little dramatic but there is no denying that they make one hell of a pairing. It’s not just talent that has catapulted them to the top of the cultural zeitgeist; they’re hard-working, compassionate and self-confident women who are well aware of their strengths and weaknesses. You don’t have to look too far to see that parenthood and their upbringing may have played a part in their success. While it’s important to note that many succeed in life despite harsh circumstances at home, others do so because they were raised by legitimate...

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property is actively looking for options through which the US can better address online piracy.
Earlier this year, it held a hearing to see what could be learned from copyright policies in other countries. This week a new meeting was put on the agenda, which zoomed in on the effectiveness of the DMCA itself. This isn’t the first time that the US Government has heard stakeholders on the DMCA and many of the arguments, both in favor and against the law, have been brought up before. The overall theme is that online services are fine with the current system while rightsholders want online services to do more.
One of the testimonies worth highlighting comes from...